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Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Brigitte Lahaie update!

I've noticed from Sitemeter that there are many Google searches for Brigitte Lahaie, which is very understandable, however a few of the links were out of date, so they have now been updated and all now work.

Here was the original post, now with updated links:

A personal favourite of mine! Brigitte Lahaie, perhaps the prettiest adult cinema star of all time. Totally natural, nothing fake and definitely no tattoos. They don't make them like this anymore.



For more info:

Brigitte's DVD's at Sazuma

Brigitte's DVD's at Xploited Cinema

Internet Movie Database

French Biography of Brigitte Lahaie

Brigitte Lahaie Photogallery - Rapidshare

Brigitte's Blog at RMC

Interview with Brigitte Lahaie for Cinema Nocturna

Spider-Pig

Spider-Pig+Homer=Funny!

That is all!


Ingmar Bergman dies at 89


Ingmar Bergman 1918-2007


The great Swedish filmaker died yesterday at 89 years of age, a favourite director of mine and he will be sadly missed. The Telegraph have a particulary fine article about him in todays edition and is very much worth a read.




"David Gritten celebrates the high aspirations of the great Swedish filmmaker, who died yesterday


It would be stretching a point to claim Ingmar Bergman invented art-house cinema. Other directors before him had presented visions of cinema so austere and serious as to exclude entertainment values completely; but Bergman was the first to attract such wide audiences to his work.


Buñuel's experiments with Dalí qualified as high art, but were so experimental as to be museum pieces. Italian neo-realists such as De Sica and Rossellini tackled serious social themes, but always addressed themselves to audiences' emotions. Bergman seemed grandly indifferent to such considerations; the rigour, seriousness and intellectual questing of his films became their unique selling point.


He became a giant on the stage of world cinema with The Seventh Seal, re-released last week in Britain on its 50th anniversary to gushing reviews. It remains his best-known film, in part because of its most striking images: the hooded, black-clad, white-faced figure of Death playing chess on a beach with a Crusader knight, and a dance of death with six people led by Death wielding a scythe.


The Seventh Seal seemed almost deliberately forbidding. Shot in black-and-white, it is a stark morality play that presents a world riven with plague and corruption and suggests the absence of God. These very qualities attracted serious-minded audiences across the world; and, in the late 1950s, with the uneasy undercurrent of the Cold War and the impact of the Holocaust still gradually sinking in, there was plenty to be serious about.


Like modern jazz and the plays of Samuel Beckett, Bergman's work flourished among earnest people who saw in it a flat rebuff to a post-war world that strived to accentuate the positive in all things.


The veteran film critic David Thomson has noted that The Seventh Seal "made Bergman the central figure in the growth of art-house cinema", adding that in Britain many people first joined the National Film Theatre specifically because of a Bergman retrospective.
He made films fast and cheaply, though it was not apparent, thanks to his excellent repertory company of actors (Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson among them) and his gifted cinematographers.


Bergman was prolific in the wake of The Seventh Seal, and Wild Strawberries, The Silence, The Virgin Spring and Persona all cemented his reputation. His taste for symbolism shaped the stories of these films, and kept his audiences happy - if "happy" is quite the word.


The other notable aspect of these earlier films is their approach to sexuality. The Silence and Persona in particular are sexually explicit (Persona verbally so), but the subject is never treated in a salacious manner. In Bergman's world, sex is merely one aspect of life - a stance that made his films seem hugely sophisticated in Britain and America.


So did his clinical analysis of relationships. In films such as A Passion and Cries and Whispers, Bergman proved himself a master at portraying bleak marriages and unhappy, dysfunctional families. (He himself was married five times.)


His camera work was so up close and personal, one could see the pores in his actors' skin - an intimacy of shooting style that corresponded to an almost psychiatric dissection of the characters' plights.


In the late '60s, as a newly permissive society caused family units and marriages to start fraying at the seams, his work seemed timely. And he is one of the few filmmakers to grapple with the subject of old age (Autumn Sonata, Sarabande) with such a lack of sentimentality.
Inevitably, his influence spread. It is impossible, for example, to imagine that a director such as Mike Nichols could have made two very different but equally dark films as The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge without having come under Bergman's spell. In Britain, John Boorman, Mike Figgis and Terry Gilliam have acknowledged the long shadow he cast.


Much has been made of the fact that Bergman's work has been widely parodied, especially The Seventh Seal. This is perhaps because his work is so defiantly serious that smiling at it seems a logical response.


(He described his own sense of humour as "morbid".) But it is easier to spoof it than to emulate it seriously - as Woody Allen found to his cost. His film Love and Death contained a fine Bergman parody, but Interiors, his portrayal of a very Bergmanesque family falling apart, was rightly judged a disaster. Still, Bergman remained the filmmaker Allen aspires to be.
Not that this adulation affected him one bit. Bergman remained resolutely in Europe, and ignored lucrative offers to shoot elsewhere. (The Danish director Lars von Trier appears to have taken him as his model in this regard.)


One can scour Bergman's 1987 autobiography The Magic Lantern for a long time without coming across the word "Hollywood". It was not that he took a conscious stand against commercial mainstream movies; he simply never addressed himself to them, perhaps feeling he was in a different business altogether.


And so he was. Effectively, Bergman opened up the possibilities of different ways of making films that resonate even now. Would the indie American film movement exist today without him? Certainly not in its present form. The Sundance Film Festival, that hotbed of films about anomie and dysfunction, would be a very different place.


He remains a role model for directors intent on making films for reasons beyond a fast buck - a shining example of what stubbornness and higher aspirations can achieve.

Northern highlights: a Bergman top five

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)


Bergman's first international success is a sophisticated comedy of manners that shatters his reputation for unmitigated Nordic gloom. Set during a country-house weekend at the turn of the last century, it traces the romantic and sexual imbroglios of eight people around a fortysomething lawyer torn between his virginal young wife and sultry mistress.This elegant farce inspired Stephen Sondheim's musical A Little Night Music and Woody Allen's best Bergman homage, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

The Seventh Seal (1957)


A knight returns from the Crusades to find that his country is abandoned by God - or that, perhaps, it has abandoned God. Not just a stark vision of spiritual crisis, the film contains indelible images, such as Max von Sydow playing chess with the Grim Reaper, or a chain of silhouetted revellers performing a defiant dance of death on the horizon. Half a century old, The Seventh Seal was re-released here last week, and remains required viewing, now more than ever.


The Silence (1963)


A boy, his mother and dying aunt arrive by train in an unidentified city in Eastern Europe. They don't speak the language, tanks roll through the streets, and their hotel is spookily deserted. Fabulously shot by Bergman's regular photographer Sven Nyqvist, this was conceived as the third in a loose trilogy about religious faith (following Through A Glass Darkly and Winter Light), but it's also surreal, darkly comic and surprisingly erotic.
Persona (1966)

Dreamy: Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in Persona


Bergman nudged towards the avant-garde with this dreamy essay about the fine line between illusion and reality, epitomised by the power struggle between a traumatised actress and her nurse whose identities imperceptibly merge in the course of a summer. It is also a film about filmmaking, with such distancing devices as sudden fragments of old silent movies, a shot of the camera crew, and the movie catching fire in the projector and running out at the end.

Fanny and Alexander (1982)


This magnificent three-hour epic is a dazzling summation of Bergman's lifelong themes. Set in the early 20th century, it begins with a small boy's magical memories of Christmas in the bosom of his exuberant family, then moves into chilly denial following his mother's marriage to a bishop, before a triumphant, life-affirming fusion of the two worlds. It is the director's masterpiece."

Mother of Tears Trailer!


The first proper teaser trailer for Dario Argento's upcoming opus has arisen over at Yahoo!, and it looks fantastic and very dark! Hopefully the movie will live up to all expectations, remember the release date looks like the 31st October in Italy, so get over to Ryanair and get those flights booked if your Italian is half-way decent.

Friday, July 27, 2007

Monster Squad has arrived!

The excellent DVD release of "The Monster Squad" has finally arrived! It looks fantastic and I'll be hopefully watching this over the weekend and reliving some childhood memories!



Click to buy at Sazuma.com


Get the OST from this great movie at the Manchester Morgue!

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

My Blog is Rated R!!!!

Was wandering around the various blogs today and my esteemed buddy Whiggles had a cool link to discover what your blog was rated - he scored an unexpected PG-13 while I got a Best Buy unfriendly R!!! What a shock - now go check out your own!


MGM Midnite Movies Update!


Source: DVD Drive-In


Due for release on September 11th are some new MGM Midnite Movie releases, I don't believe any at all were released last year so these are some welcome new additions to the collection. "Food of the Gods" looks titillating, lets hope it lives up to the cover!!


You can see the cover scans HERE



The Roundtable: Week 56




Name your favourite opening credit sequence in a horror film:




"Easy one this week, Dario Argento’s Suspiria, fantastic opening for a great film, and one I’ll be revisiting before going to Italy to watch the final chapter “Mother of Tears”!"


As I said above, can't wait to head over and see this movie, hope it lives up to his best work!

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

THE FRIDAY THE 13th BLOG-A-THON


THE FRIDAY THE 13th BLOG-A-THON FRIDAY, JULY 13th, 2007
From the Final Girl Blog:
"If you're still feeling in the dark, here's the skinny: in my dreams, on Friday, July 13th the blogosphere will come alive Frampton-style as peeps posts anything and everything about the Friday the 13th film series, or anything and everything that falls under that umbrella. Unlike the Final Girl Film Club, posts made during the blog-a-thon don't have to be simple reviews: say whatever you want to say. Want to talk about the old 8-bit Friday the 13th video game? Fine. Want to write a plot synopsis for your fantasy Friday film, Jason vs Those Animated Penguins I'm So Fucking Tired Of? Go for it. Maybe an epic poem about the twins from The Final Chapter, or a profile on Harry Manfredini, or a haiku about the first time you saw a Friday film, or...well, I think you get it."
I think this sounds like a cool idea, so get posting either here or over at the Final Girl Blog and make it a Friday 13th to remember.

Monday, July 09, 2007

Huge Severin Films Update




Severin has just signed five astounding Italian erotic classics - three of which feature Laura Gemser as black Emanuelle and two satanic sinfests.

EMANUELLE & THE WHITE SLAVE TRADE: a rousing reunion of the formidable EMANUELLE IN AMERICA team of Gemser and the mighty Joe D'Amato!
SISTER EMANUELLE: our favorite open-minded nymph has a change of heart and trades in her sexual habits for a sexy habit. You can imagine what kind of sinful shenanigans subsequently go on behind convent walls!

BLACK EMMANUELLE/WHITE EMMANUELLE: Actually a crafty retitling of BLACK VELVET but it not only boasts Gemser, you also get the delicious Annie Belle (HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK; LAURE) and giallo queen Susan Scott (DEATH WALKS IN HIGH HEELS)!

And last but certainly not least the first official DVD releases of the ultimate possessed nun sleaze-fest and its follow up.

MALABIMBA: THE MALICIOUS WHORE: You may be familiar with other outrageous Andrea Bianchi works such as BURIAL GROUND and STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER but even they won't prepare you for the dirty delights of MALABIMBA, which features arguably the most salacious invalid death scene in cinema history!

SATAN'S BABY DOLL: One year later Mario Bianchi (no relation) remade MALABIMBA and threw heroin addiction and zombies into the mix!


Malabimba and Satan's are due Sept 19th, 2007!

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Soundtrack Collector


Finally got round to putting my movie soundtracks online, so take a look if you want to see what I like to relax listening too!


Checkout the site here: Soundtrack Collector

Eurocinema - Great Marketing


I've always had a penchant for European cinema whether from Bergman and Di Sica or Deodato and Fulci, and this video from the European Commission promoting the European film scene; Definiitely the right way to go about it - but how many movies can you spot?




Roundtable: Week 53



Since David Z of the excellent movie blog "Tomb it may Concern" was the only one of us to contribute to every edition of the Roundtable, then this weeks edition was all about him!

Name your favourite David Z. moment.

Nick - DVDTrash
Definitely has to be the The Eurotrash Film Pinnacle Project, was great to see so many others like the same crap as me!

Warren - 150 Days of Sodom
When he posted all the posters he found online for the Italian film Tough to Kill, I definitely thought we were on the same wavelength.

Curt - Groovy Age of Horror
Haha–where to begin?!? How about with, “Hello David Z (I presume).” Congrats on the new arrival, David Z (I presuuume!), and keep up the great work!!

Kimberly - Cinebeats
I’ve gotta go with the ongoing They Call Her Archived project he’s been putting together. I’m really impressed with his focus and dedication. I find it all really inspiring and it’s great that he’s sharing all his stuff with his blog readers. Cheers to David!

Steven - The Horror Blog
I failed to win a contest David Z. held to give away copies of his excellent chapbook Ascension of the Blind Dead, but he sent it to me anyway for which I am incredibly grateful. I was already familar with The Blind Dead from years back, but David’s chapbook prompted me to obsess over the characters, leading to J. buying the set for me. Thanks, David!

JA - My New Plaid Pants
The word “GoonaHumpasploitation” rocks my world.

I think you'd agree a very worthy subject!

New DVD's on the way!


Some new ( and some not so new) titles added to the DVD Trash library:


Homicide: Life on the Street - The Complete Series (R1, NBC Home Video)

Road House: Deluxe Edition (R1, MGM)

Beastmaster: SE (R1, Anchor Bay)

Battlestar Galactica (R2, Universal)

Paranoia (R2, Millenium)


Not arrived yet but on the way are:


Trilogy of Terror (R1,Dark Sky)

Stone Cold (R1, MGM) - The Brian Bosworth Mullet Edition!!!

Gwendoline: Unrated Directors Cut (R1, Severin)